New stories unveiled: Those Port of Oakland executives on their way out the door over a $4,500 bill from a Houston strip club are putting out new versions of how the scandal came about.

Omar Benjamin, who is already gone as the port's executive director, and soon-to-be-former maritime operations director James Kwonracked up the tab in 2008, at what Kwon indicated was a meal with executives of the BNSF Railway. The visit only recently came to light, and was Exhibit A in just-released audits of port executives' expense-account habits.

Both men have now admitted to auditors that there were no shipping execs at the strip-club lunch - though Benjamin and Kwon gave conflicting accounts of how the tab got so big.

Kwon says he sat alone at the bar and smoked outside for an hour and a half, while Benjamin bought "adult entertainment dances" in the club's "champagne lounge."

Benjamin says he and Kwon drank together at the bar for the entire visit. Benjamin also says he didn't realize the bill was getting so high and that they were "victims of a billing scam," not uncommon to credit card users in strip clubs.

Records show that in September 2009, a year after the Houston lunch, the two men spent $925 at the Sheik's Palace Royale strip club in Minneapolis.

Once again, there was no port business conducted - and once again Kwon denied he had hung out with Benjamin, saying he spent most of the time talking with a security guard while the boss was in the "private area."

Awkward timing: Talk about clutching a victory from the jaws of defeat - no sooner did the Alameda County Transportation Authority concede the razor-narrow defeat of its $7.8 billion sales tax measure than its board rewarded its executive director, Art Dao, with a $10,000 raise.

The raise, which is retroactive to Sept. 1, brings Dao's annual salary to $215,000.

"The timing is horrible - I agree," Dao told us. But he says his raise wasn't dependent on the success of the 1-cent sales tax plan on the Nov. 6 ballot, which fell about 730 votes shy of the two-thirds approval required.

Instead, he says, it was based on his many other successes since taking over in 2010, including consolidating the work of two agencies and expediting spending from the county's last transportation tax measure. He also declined a pay raise last year.

Authority spokeswoman Tess Lengyelsays Dao's salary is still less than what his counterparts make in San Francisco and Contra Costa County.